The needle-tip-sized nozzle precisely aimed at the region with the densest powder, adjusted to a more conservative position than the value recommended in literature, then Duke activated the vacuum rune on the collector with the slightest force.
A barely audible inhalation sound followed, as several grains of gray-white powder were sucked into the nozzle, traveling through the spiral path of the vacuum chamber into the storage compartment.
The entire process was as silent as a butterfly landing on a petal, without causing any energy disturbance.
Duke didn’t rush to continue. He paused for a few seconds, using Spiritual Power to inspect the state of the first grain of powder in the storage chamber—gray-white, intact granules, stable activity, with no signs of contamination.
Only then did he slowly exhale half a breath, moving beside the next plant, repeating the same operation.
Each plant’s collection angle was slightly different; some branches curved to the left, some leaned to the right, some had uneven powder distribution on their surfaces requiring suction from the densest side, and some plants had stray weak energy flows around them, requiring him to wait for a few breaths until the energy flow naturally drifted away before proceeding.
Throughout, he made no sound beyond the collector’s faint suction noise, even adjusting his breathing to a very shallow and slow rhythm, keeping his Spiritual Power shielding fully active, firmly locking all his Spiritual Power fluctuations within.
About halfway through the collection process, Duke suddenly stopped.
Maintaining a half-kneeling posture, he remained motionless, not even turning his eyes, extending his perception with Spiritual Power slowly outward.
After a few breaths, he resumed collecting, with movements still steady, the rhythm unchanged, as if the pause was merely to allow the collected plants a moment of reprieve.
During those few moments of pause, he sensed something had passed by from the direction of the hills.
It wasn’t coming towards him, nor did it look in his direction, just passing by.
Whatever it was didn’t notice him and went away.
Duke continued collecting; the amount of powder on the surface of each plant wasn’t much, but his steady hands ensured almost zero wastage.
After collecting from the plants, he detached the storage compartment, twisting it into the sealed container’s interface, confirming the seal was effective before moving onto the next plant.
This process had been drilled in his mind dozens of times; doing it now required nearly no pause.
Ten minutes later, the storage chamber had already accumulated half a tube.
The gray-white powder quietly lay at the bottom of the chamber, emitting extremely faint low-frequency fluctuations under Spiritual Power perception.
The quality was better than he had anticipated; the energy-poor edge region had actually increased the purity of the dust, with minimal impurities, almost free from any Spiritual Power residue contamination.
Duke straightened up, gazing beyond the low shrubland that had been largely collected, toward the south.
Panshi’s scouting two days ago marked another area with higher attachment density on the south slope, not far, taking only a few minutes’ walk.
The lunar surface’s vein contraction had just begun accelerating, with enough collection window left for him to gather another batch.
He didn’t follow the original path through the forest but moved along the forest and hill border toward the south.
This route had more ground rubble, a thin layer of dead leaves, shallow footprints, allowing quicker movement than weaving through dense woods.
A few minutes later, the marked slope by Panshi appeared ahead, slanting northwest, the gray-white daylight evenly spilled, with low-growing vegetation denser than the previous area. The gray-white powder adhered to the branch surfaces twinkled with far denser low-frequency fluctuations under energy perception, the quality seeming better than the last batch.
Yet Duke didn’t walk over immediately.
He paused behind a twisted black tree at the slope’s edge, pressing his body against the trunk, gathering his aura to the extreme.
Not because he saw anything, quite the opposite, his eyes and normal Spiritual Power perception detected no anomalies.
But intuition was sounding the alarm, a kind honed over time into an indescribable alertness, similar to the chill sensed a few breaths before Jin Mo slammed down a palm outside the Four Spirits Elemental Plane’s Molten Fire Fortress.
Something was off here, or rather, something he should be perceiving but wasn’t.
He concentrated his Spiritual Power into an extremely fine beam, akin to using a needle tip to touch the air ahead, slowly and cautiously sweeping across the low shrubland on the slope.
The first scan revealed nothing.
Then Duke conducted more meticulous perception, discovering around a patch of low shrub about thirty steps away, several extremely weak energy signals.
They were so small, normal Spiritual Power perception would automatically categorize them as part of the environmental background noise, much like the Level 1 beginner burrower creatures under the layer of dead leaves, with extremely low energy intensity and intermittent signals, posing no threat.
Yet the movement of these signals wasn’t random, not blindly burrowing through soil, but purposefully and systematically moving on the vegetation cluster’s surface.
Duke slightly narrowed his eyes, focusing his Spiritual Power even more finely, almost compressed into a needle-tip-thick probe, carefully approaching from the side to observe.
Then he saw clearly they were not insects under dead leaves, but a group of humanoid life forms no larger than an adult’s thumb.
Their body proportions were highly akin to humans, with complete limbs, bodies, and heads, slender and delicate limbs, skin showing a nearly transparent pale blue hue, almost blending into the surrounding environment under the gray-white daylight.
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